An uncommon term today, though it was not so in Mary Shelley's age. Johnson's Dictionary
(1775) defines "searoom" rather grandly as "Open water; spacious main," and quotes
two seventeenth-century sources in support.
As with the diction of the previous sentence, here, too, Percy Bysshe Shelley attributes
to Mary Shelley's writing a bold originality he will, in prefatory remarks, later
claim for his own as well. See, for example, the opening paragraphs of the Preface
to Prometheus Unbound (1820).
Here a general term for knowledge. Johnson's 1755 Dictionary delineates the contemporary
range of meanings of the word.
Slaves forever in a rage. In her revisions Mary Shelley is betrayed into a historical
anachronism, for it was only with the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 that Austria,
already given the northeastern section of Italy in 1797, additionally was ceded Lombardy.
Its capital, Milan, was thereafter a center of subversive unrest, and many of its
leading citizens in the 1820s were convicted of sedition and incarcerated in the infamous
Austrian prison of Spielberg. Silvio Pellico's account, Le mie prigioni (My Prisons)
was published in 1832, the year after the third edition of Frankenstein, and became
a European best-seller. In the decade and a half following the Congress of Vienna,
Britain became a center for exiles from the Milanese intelligentsia, among whom was
Gabriele Rossetti, father of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
As contemporary English readers might be anticipated almost automatically to sympathize
with the plight of a Milanese exile, so they would respond to the essentially imperialist
ethos of this description of the blond beauty distinguished as a "rose among dark-leaved
brambles." Both Elizabeth's aristocratic background and her fair northern beauty play
to the expectations of the main line of British fiction in the early 1830s, what because
of its high-bourgeois conventions has come to be called "the Silver Fork School."
A highly contagious disease, usually encountered in childhood, caused by hemolytic
streptococus. It is spread through the air or through contaminated food, and was virtually
untreatable before the development of antibiotics, although penicillin and gamma globulin
have made it much less common in the twentieth century.
Scarlet fever's onset is sudden (typically two to seven days after exposure), beginning
with a sore throat, shivering, and a headache. It develops on the second day into
a rash behind the ears, which spreads to the arms and legs. Thomas Sydenham, a physician
of the late seventeenth century, describes its symptoms thus: "The skin is marked
with small, red spots, more frequent, more diffuse, and more red than in measles.
These last two or three days. They then disappear, leaving the skin covered with brawny
squamulae [scales], as if powdered with meal." Scarlet fever leaves the glands swollen
and often sensitive; in some cases, the squamulae on parts of the patient's skin peel
off.
The greatest threats arise from complications. Sinus infections, abcesses of the ear,
and mastoiditis are common. In a few cases, scarlet fever leads to arthritis, rheumatic
fever, or kidney failure.
